9/07/2009 @ 12:00AM

The NFL's Annual Tease

I came home on a recent summer evening; not to the small row house in Northwest Washington I’ve lived in since moving from New York, but to a downtown bar called the Bottom Line. It’s here that I’ve spent the majority of my Sunday afternoons, sharing time with friends whose last names I will probably never know, individuals who got me through a broken engagement and the implosion of an industry to which I’d dedicated my adult life.

The occasion was the preseason kickoff party for Washington-area Cincinnati Bengals fans at Bottom Line, the bar we’ve claimed as our own. The 15 or 20 or so of us that gathered donned the team’s gaudy colors–orange and black–drank from a keg of beer a few fellow fans had bought and watched the 1981 AFC Championship game that launched the Bengals to the first of their two Super Bowl appearances.

“I just can’t wait,” said Joe, a crew-cut bear of a man, as we spoke about the August exhibition matches. “They’ve looked good, real good.”

It was in this moment that I realized that the Bengals were more than my own strange obsession and more than a reminder of my upbringing in southwest Ohio. The Bengals are something more; they are America’s team.

Or rather, the real America’s team. Unlike the Dallas Cowboys, who grabbed that mantle during the 1970s with a god-fearing coach and quarterback, barely dressed cheerleaders and a dynamic, winning squad, the Bengals embody what makes the National Football League the most dominant force in our country’s sports landscape–the impenetrable fortress and a measuring stick by which all other professional leagues are measured. The NFL, like our current president during his campaign, offers us hope.

It’s the economics of the game that make it so. At a time when we argue about whether or not we’re becoming a socialized nation, our national sport follows a kind of gross capitalist-socialist hybrid first put into place when the Wellington brothers, then-owners of the New York Giants, agreed to national television revenue sharing in the 1960s. By reported accounts, the league earns $3.65 billion through television alone these days. In the modern era, the league imposes a salary cap for all of its teams, limiting how much each team can spend for talent.

These two things form the foundation of the modern NFL, one in which market size and stadium revenue isn’t supposed to translate into results. Indeed, while the Dallas Cowboys can relish their $1 billion new stadium, fans in San Diego and Pittsburgh, in Nashville and Minnesota, can only shrug. Their teams made the playoffs last year. Dallas didn’t.

Of course this ideal doesn’t apply to all teams–particularly mine. I’ve been asked more than once, “Have you ever tried not being a Bengals fan?” It’s a fair question, offered by those who have my mental health in mind. Because while teams in similar or smaller markets have thrived in recent years, Cincinnati, since the death of its founder, the legendary Paul Brown, in 1991, has a record 101-187-1 with one playoff appearance.

Brown’s son, Mike, has been ridiculed for running a mom-and-pop business in a Walmart age, filling most of the front office staff with family members–most prominently his daughter, Katie Blackburn, who serves as the team’s executive vice president. While the Brown family has enjoyed the monetary windfall of the NFL system, the fans have not.

And yet there I was at The Bottom Line. It was a scene probably replicated by fans of different teams in different cities across the country, all talking about what we were–injuries and coaching philosophies, hopes for new rookies and the return to form of fallen stars. These were conversations laced with the fierce conviction that the Bengals could take the division and more. No matter what past performances or the true performance we all know is likely to come, we love and will watch and support them. Because we’ve bought into the mythos the league has conjured, all of us believers in the NFL’s annual tease.

Sridhar Pappu is a former correspondent for The Atlantic and staff writer for The Washington Post and New York Observer. He is currently at work on a book project about the 1964 Freedom Summer Movement.